Shaken Germany Sheds Tears For Victims Of Ill-fated Flight

BERLIN — Flags flew at half-staff throughout Germany on Wednesday as the country mourned for its 96 victims aboard the Air France Concorde that crashed Tuesday near Paris.

"Germany is shaken and Germany is speechless," Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said at a a memorial service in Hanover, where his cabinet had opted to hold its last weekly meeting before the summer vacation at the German pavilion in the Expo 2000 world fair.

Referring to the German passengers whose ill-fated flight was to have taken them to a luxury cruise embarking from New York, Schroeder added: "They were taken from life in the midst of a moment of joyful anticipation. France and Germany are united in respect for the victims and sympathy for the relatives."

More than 350 people, including most of Schroeder's cabinet, attended the service, and many wept openly. Bishop Josef Homeyer asked simply, "God, where were you in Paris?"

The public outpouring of sentiment and the order from Interior Ministry Otto Schily to lower all flags to half-staff were unusual in a generally reserved country that tends to shun displays of national emotion. "Ninety-six Germans burned to death," screamed a headline in the Bild newspaper.

Schroeder said he had received messages of condolences from throughout the world.

The supersonic jet crashed Tuesday shortly after takeoff from the Charles de Gualle Airport outside Paris, killing all 109 on board. In addition to the 96 German passengers, there were two Danes, one Austrian and one American, in addition to nine crew members, all French. Four people on the ground were killed when the plane crashed into a small hotel in Gonesse, a suburb nine miles northeast of Paris; three were staff members -- two Polish and one French -- and one was a British tourist.

It was the first time a Concorde has crashed.

The German Foreign Ministry said it would not release the names of the passengers out of respect for the victims' families, who would face "a thousand journalists" if their identities were known. But a few details of the travelers, who had paid as much as $11,000 for the flight and planned cruise, emerged.

The Bavarian automaker BMW, said the crash killed a 57-year-old senior manager, his 36-year-old wife and their two children. At the two children's school, classmates and teachers were in tears.

In the northwestern city of Moenchengladbach, city officials said 13 residents had been killed, six couples aged mostly between 50 and 70 and an 8-year-old child. The couples knew each other and had all booked their journey through a local travel agent, Christian Stattrop.

The Foreign Ministry said 50 relatives of the dead had accepted an offer from Air France to fly to Paris. The first dozen of them were met in the French capital Wednesday by Reinhard Klimmt, the German transport minister.

"Concorde has been one of the truly reliable planes," Klimmt said. "But technology can fail and in this case it failed terribly." The transport minister, who is on the left of Schroeder's Social Democratic Party, has in the past been critical of the way technological advances can threaten jobs.

Germans are avid travelers, spending an estimated $43 billion a year on trips abroad. The crash was the worst disaster to befall them since 189 people, most of them Germans, were killed when a plane went down off the Dominican Republic in 1996.

Peter Deilmann, the owner of the tour operator based in northern Germany that chartered the Concorde flight, runs Germany's biggest private cruise fleet, with 11 ships carrying about 45,000 passengers a year. "The situation is horrible and we are still in a state of shock," he said Wednesday.